"Like, whether a tree had lost its leaves in the night. Or whether there were a lot of people standing around in a normally desolate area. Or whether there are lots of devices operating between foo and bar that are interfering with them." Kurt nodded slowly. "The packets we lose could be just as interesting as the packets we don't lose," he said. A light went on in Alan's head. "We could be like jazz critics, listening to the silences instead of the notes," he said. They all looked at him. "That's very good," Lyman said. "Like a jazz critic." He smiled. Alan smiled back. "What are we seeing, Craig?" Lyman said. "Kurt," Alan said. "Right, Kurt," he said. "Sorry." "We're seeing the grid here. See how the access points go further up the spectrum the more packets they get? I'm associated with that bad boy right there." He gestured to the box blinking silently in the middle of the board room table. "And it's connected to one other, which is connected to a third." Lyman picked up his phone and dialed a speed-dial number. "Hey, can you unplug the box on my desk?" A moment later, one of the boxes on the display winked out. "Watch this," Kurt said, as the remaining two boxes were joined by a coruscating line. "See that? Self-healing. Minimal packet loss. Beautiful." "That's hot," Lyman said. "That makes me all wet." They chuckled nervously at his crudity. "Seriously." "Here," Kurt said, and another window popped up, showing twenty or more boxes with marching ant trails between them. "That's a time-lapse of the Kensington network. The boxes are running different versions of the firmware, so you can see that in some edge cases, you get a lot more oscillation between two similar signals. We fixed that in the new version." The graybeard said, "How?" "We flip a coin," Kurt said, and grinned. "These guys in Denmark ran some simulations, proved that a random toss-up worked as well as any other algorithm, and it's a lot cheaper, computationally." "So what's going on just to the northeast of center?" Alan paid attention to the patch of screen indicated. Three access points were playing musical chairs, dropping signal and reacquiring it, dropping it again. Kurt shrugged. "Bum hardware, I think. We've got volunteers assembling those boxes, from parts." "Parts?" Kurt's grin widened. "Yeah. From the trash, mostly. I dumpster-dive for 'em." They grinned back. "That's very hot," Lyman said. "We're looking at normalizing the parts for the next revision," Alan said. "We want to be able to use a single distro that works on all of them." "Oh, sure," Lyman said, but he looked a little disappointed, and so did Kurt. "Okay, it works," Lyman said. "It works?" he said, nodding the question at his posse. They nodded back. "So what can we do for you?" Alan chewed his lip, caught himself at it, stopped. He'd anticipated a slugfest, now he was getting strokes.